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The Fuegians have been reported, from time to
time, since the country was first sighted and
named by Magellan in 1520, but to-day they
still remain almost unknown. In connection
with the voyage of the Belgica we had unusual
opportunities for studying their wild life
and their weather-beaten land. They are not,
as is generally supposed, one homogeneous
tribe, but three distinct races, with
different languages, different appearances,
different habits and homes.
In the western Chilean channels, living in
beech-bark canoes and in dugouts, using
mussels, snails, crabs, and fish in general
as food, are the short, imperfectly developed
Aliculufs. These are met by many vessels
navigating the Strait of Magellan, and most
of our reports of Fuegians are limited to
hasty glimpses of these people; but they are
now nearly extinct, and they always were the
lowest and the most abject of the Fuegians.
Closely allied in habits to the Aliculufs are
the Indians inhabiting the islands about Cape
Horn and northward to Beagle Channel. These
are called Yahgans. They have been the most
numerous and the most powerful of the Fuegian
people, but to-day they too are nearly
extinct. They are dwarfed in stature, dwarfed
in mental development, and, like the
Aliculufs, live in canoes, and feed upon the
products of the sea.
The third tribe is the race of giants. They
are called Onas by their neighbors, the
Yahgans. The Onas have thus far evaded all
efforts at civilization, have refused
missionaries, and have, to the present time,
with good reason, mistrusted white men. They
have, in consequence, remained absolutely
unknown.
Page 721
It is the purpose of this article to offer
the reader of THE CENTURY a general outline
of the information gathered by the Belgian
Antarctic Expedition among this strange
people.
The homes of the Onas are on the main island
of Tierra del Fuego. For centuries they have
fought to keep this as their preserve; but
the Yahgans have been allowed to pitch their
homes on the southern coastal fringe along
Beagle Channel. In a like manner the
Aliculufs have been permitted to use the
shore-line of the west. Neither the Yahgans
nor the Aliculufs, however, nor white men,
until very recently, have dared to venture
into the interior. The great prairies of the
north and the mountain forests of the middle
of the island, with its still unknown lakes,
have been guarded as hunting-ground
exclusively for the Onas. The island is
nearly as large as the State of New York. The
boundary-line of Chile and Argentina, running
from north to south through the middle of the
island, gives each republic a nearly equal
share of the country. Gold has been found in
the sands along the beach of various parts of
the land. This is being mined with
considerable success. The pampas of the north
and a part of the southern ground have proved
to be some of the best sheep-farming country
of the world. The gold-diggers and the
sheep-farmers have thus rediscovered Tierra
del Fuego.
A Fuegian Cowboy
The mining-camps and the wire fences are
crowding the once ruling race of Onas into
the useless forest-covered lowlands and the
ice-covered highlands of the interior, where
they must either starve or freeze or perish
at the hands of Caucasian invaders. The old
happy hunting-ground of the Ona has gone the
way of all other Indian homes; but he has
fought bravely for it, and he will continue
to do so until the last skeleton is left to
bleach on the wind-swept pampa.
The Onas, as a tribe, have never been united
in a common interest, nor have they ever been
led by any one great chief. They have always
been divided into small clans under a leader
with limited powers, and these chiefs have
waged constant warfare among themselves. To
the present they have had their worst enemies
among their own people, but now that
sheep-farmers and gold-diggers want their
country, they are uniting to fight their
common enemy.
The advent of the sheep-farmer was very important
Page 722
a factor in the future extermination of the
Fuegian Indians, and in the early development
of the southern point of South America, that
the industry deserves a special notice. The
desolate Falkland Islands and the wastes of
Patagonia have long been used as prosperous
sheep-farms, but Tierra del Fuego was, until
recently, regarded as too sterile to support
any life except the guanaco and Indians. The
first attempt to prove the possibilities of
the Fuegian pampa was made at a point
opposite Punta Arenas.
AN ONA CHIEF
REDRAWN BY W. B. KER
The honor of this enterprise is due to Mr.
Steubenrach, the British consular agent.
Steubenrach brought from the Falkland Islands
a number of sheep, and fenced and stocked a
small experimental farm. Anticipating trouble
with the powerful Onas, who have always been
the dread of white settlers in this region,
Steubenrach secured, as one of his shepherds,
a missionary to preach the gospel and
morality and some other things to the
Indians. This mission service was a
diplomatic stroke, which was thought to be
Page 723
the most effective way of gaining the favor
of the Chilean government and thus obtaining
grants of land, and it was also thought
possible, by this method, to tame the
aborigines and make shepherds of them. The
good preacher tried to Christianize and
civilize the Indians. During the day they
congregated in large numbers to hear the new
medicine-man. They were indeed interested;
but they proved their interest in an
unexpected manner.
At night, when all was quiet and the
shepherds were asleep, confident of the
effect of their pious training upon the
Indians, the hunters came among the herds,
cut the wire fences, and drove off such
numbers as suited their appetites. These
night raids continued month after month, but
the Indians came in fearlessly in increasing
numbers to listen to the gospel. At length,
driven to distraction, the white men sent to
Punta Arenas for Winchester rifles. Preaching
was then abandoned, and the murderous sound
of firearms has taken its place ever since.
Page 724
The wire fences have been extended, the
Winchesters have been multiplied, every
available acre of Fuegian ground has been
covered with sheep, while the Indians, never
known and never understood, have been swept
from their ancient homes.
In defense of the pioneers it should be said that
the Indians from the first have waged a
constant and relentless warfare. A mutual
understanding has at no time seemed possible,
and if the pioneers would follow their
business a vigorous defense was necessary. In
spite of the destructive onslaughts of the
Indians, however, the farms have flourished
so well that to-day the number of sheep
raised individually and collectively by the
Fuegian rancheros is perfectly astonishing.
There is one farm not yet quite stocked which
will support six hundred thousand sheep.
There are others of one hundred thousand, and
a farm which does not herd twenty-five
thousand is considered small. The profit over
and above all expenses averages about fifty
cents annually for each animal. This would
give, for a farm of moderate size, a clear
gain of fifty thousand dollars yearly, which
is certainly a princely income for a farmer.
The proprietors of these ranches are mostly
men of large means, who live in luxury and
comfort in the cities of South America and
Europe.
The Ona population at present is about
sixteen hundred, divided into sixteen tribes
of about one hundred each. From this number
there is a constant diminution. Many of the
children have been taken from their wild
homes bordering on the sheep-farms and placed
in European families about Punta Arenas.
These children thrive well at first, and are
capable of considerable education, but few
reach adult age. The minor children's
diseases, such as measles and whooping-cough,
are extremely fatal to them, and those who
escape other diseases are almost certain to
succumb to tuberculosis.
For a number of years the Indians, watching
the encroachment of white men upon their
territory, have made it as uncomfortable as
possible for the intruders. To bag a settler
was quite as much sport as to secure game,
and the white men, in return, have shot
Indians with as much elation as if they were
hitting panthers. Killing has been in vogue
on both sides, but the battle is uneven. The
Indian must vanish before the lead of
Christians. Such is the mission of modern
civilization.
Migration from one part of the island to
another, and from one clan to another, has
been common, but the Ona has seldom left his
chosen land. A few have been found in
Patagonia, and occasionally one has been seen
among the Yahgans and the Aliculufs; but
these have only been stragglers who, by
Page 725
accident, have been separated from the main
island. The Onas possess no canoes with which
to cross the Strait of Magellan or the canals
south and west; but they barter with the
Indians along Beagle Channel and the west,
and in recent years with the white settlers
along the south. The men have a great
admiration for women of other tribes, and
this admiration induces them to make raids
among the other Indians to capture women. So
much was this done in the past that in the
southeastern part of the island there sprang
up a new race, a hibrid mixture of Yahgans
and Onas; but these are now extinct.
Physically the Onas are giants. They are not,
however, seven or eight feet in height, as
the early explorers reported their neighbors
and nearest relatives, the Patagonians, to
be. Their average height is close to six
feet, a few attain six feet and six inches,
and a few are under six feet. The women are
not so tall, but they are more corpulent.
There is perhaps no race in the world with a
more perfect physical development than the
Ona men. This unique development is partly
due to the topography of their country and to
the distribution of game, which makes long
marches constantly necessary. The Ona men are
certainly the greatest cross-country runners
on the American continent.
The mental equipment of the Ona is by no
means equal to his splendid physical
development. He understands very well the few
arts of the chase which he finds necessary to
maintain a food-supply. His game in the past
has been easily gotten; his needs have been
few, which fact accounts for the lack of
inventive skill portrayed in the instruments
of the chase. The home life, the house, the
clothing -- everything portrays this lack of
progressive skill. Instead of the children
being well dressed and well cared for, as is
the rule among savage races, they are mostly
naked, poorly fed, badly trained, and
altogether neglected, not because of a lack
of paternal love, but because of the mental
lethargy of the people. It is the same as to
shelter and garments. They have abundant
material to make good tents and warm,
storm-proof houses; but they simply bunch up
a few branches, and throw to the windward a
few skins, and then shiver, complaining of
their miserable existence.
It has never fallen to my lot to listen to a
language so odd, so strikingly peculiar, as
that of the Onas. Some of my companions on
the Belgica said that from a distance the
talk of a group of Onas was like that of a
group of Englishmen. To this I have
protested, for that statement is certainly a
libel on English. This might be said with
considerable truth of the Yahgan tongue,
which is smooth and easy; but of the
grunting, choking, spasmodic talk of the Onas
it is untrue.
Many of the words are not
difficult to pronounce, nor is the
construction of sentences hard; but in every
fifth or sixth word there is a sound
impossible to reproduce by any one who has
not had years of practice. These sounds offer
sudden breaks in the flow of words, and the
speaker, by efforts which suggest the getting
of sounds from the stomach, struggles for
something far down in his throat. He hacks
and coughs and grunts, distorting his face
momentarily in the most inhuman manner, and
then passes on to the next stumbling-block,
or whatever it is which makes the poor mortal
suffer such tortures of speech. I always felt
like offering him an emetic when I heard him
talk.
Like all the American aborigines, the Onas
feed principally upon meat, and this meat was
in former years obtained from the guanaco.
The guanaco roamed about in large herds upon
the pampas and grassy lowlands, regions now
in use as sheep-farms. The guanaco, like the
Indian, is forced to the barren interior
mountains, where life is a hard struggle
against storms and barrenness and perennial
snows. Owing to the present greater
difficulty of hunting these animals and their
reduced numbers, the Ona has taken most
naturally to the sheep which have been
brought to occupy these lands.
That the sheep are owned by other men is a fact not easily
recognized by Indians to whom the world of
Fuegian wilderness has always been free. The
many thousands of guanaco blanco, as the Onas
call sheep, grazing peacefully upon the
Indian hunting-grounds, make a picture full
of irresistible temptation, as the
aborigines, hungry and half naked, look from
icy mountain forests down over the plains.
Shall we call them thieves if, while their
wives and children and loved ones are
starving, they boldly descend and, in the
face of Winchester rifles, take what to them
seems a product of their own country?
Unfortunately, the Indians have had so many
causes for revenge against the white invaders
that they no longer capture sheep, as they
did primarily, to satisfy the pangs of
hunger, but to obtain vengeance. The
wholesale manner in which they do this,
however, would make a beggar of an ordinary
farmer in a single night. In the neighborhood
Page 726
of Useless Bay they have been known to round
up two thousand sheep in one raid, and they
seldom now take less than a few hundred at a
time. While stopping at a farm on the Rio
Grande I had an opportunity of being in close
proximity to this kind of warfare. The
Indians came in and asked for an interview
with the chief of the farm. The man in charge
was a bright young fellow, who knew the
Indians very well. He treated the delegation
kindly, fed and clothed them, and listened to
their story.
The Indians spoke in broken Spanish, and said
that they had been sent by the great chief
Colchichoali to ask if the manager of this
farm would make an arrangement for amicable
and peaceful relations in the future.
Colchichoali and his people had for a long
time been on friendly terms with Mr. Bridges,
a farmer on the southern shore. While here
many had died and many others were sickly. It
was the wrong season for them in the south.
The winter was too cold there, the spirits
were against them, and
Page 727
for reasons of health alone they must seek
their old haunts on the sunny northern shores
for the winter. They had been ten days
crossing the island over the snowy interior
mountains. They had been several days already
without food. The women and children were
starving. The entire tribe were at the edge
of the forest about one hundred miles to the
south. Would Mr. Menendez give them a little
food for present needs, and a preserve where
the people might live and hunt in their own
way, undisturbed by the soldiers and the
shepherds?
Mr. Menendez replied in the affirmative, and
then went on to qualify his offer. He said
that at first he was not inclined to treat
their demand seriously; that he suffered so
much at their hands by unlimited thefts of so
many thousands of sheep, and by their
heartless destruction of his fences, etc.,
that he was not in an easy mood to harbor
them near his farms; but if they promised to
be good, if they agreed to steal no more
sheep, he would give them the southern bank
of a river about ten miles southward, where
they might pitch their tents, hunt and fish,
and live undisturbed. He further agreed that
he would give them as much meat as they
required.
The Indians returned to their chief to report
the success of their mission. Owing to their
lengthy stay, however, the chief thought that
they had been killed, and in retaliation
ordered the raiding of five hundred sheep,
which, of course, made the consummation of an
amicable agreement impossible. In defense of
the Indians, however, it should be said that
one year previous a similar arrangement had
been entered into in good faith. The Indians
came trustingly to a camp, where the entire
company, men, women, and children, were
seized by soldiers and exiled from the
island.
The Onas have been masters of Tierra del
Fuego, not because of the perfection of their
implements of war, but because of their
splendid physical force. The only destructive
weapon which they have brought to effective
use is the bow and arrow. The bow used by
them is made of the wood of the Antarctic
beech, which is scraped and worked into the
desired shape by the sharp edge of one of the
numerous shells which everywhere are found on
the beach. The string is made of the sinews
of the guanaco, neatly braided. The
arrow-shaft is a reed-like branch of a tree
called the Winter's bark; it is winged with
feathers of native birds, and is tipped with
a unique glass point.
In former years, before vessels entered the
Strait of Magellan, and before the passage
around Cape Horn was discovered, the Onas
tipped their arrows with flint; but since
white men have invaded these waters their
misfortunes have been the fortunes of the
Indians. From the many wrecks thrown upon the
rocky shores during the last three hundred
years, the aborigines have obtained glass,
with which they now point their arrows, and
also iron, of which they make knives.
Within the last twenty-five years they have
occasionally bagged an unwary gold-digger,
and his kit has been added to their own
imperfect implements of chase; but they have
never been able to obtain ammunition, and so
the rifles in their camp are of no use. The
traders and farmers on the borderlands, with
whom these Indians have to come in contact,
have always been alive to their own
interests. They have prudently refused to
sell firearms or ammunition. If the Onas were
able to obtain guns and supplies they would
clear their island of pale-faced settlers in
less than a month.
With the bow and arrow as their sole
implement of chase, the Onas roam about
always in the footprints of the guanaco from
the barren interior mountains to the
forest-covered lowlands, and during the
winter from the forests over the pampas to
the seashore. If they fail in securing their
favored game, the guanaco, they capture a
kind of ground-rat, or gather the snails and
mussels of the beach; but the one grand aim
of life is to hunt the guanaco.
Day after day in the chase the whole family
march over windswept plains, through icy
streams, into regions seemingly ever deserted
by animal life. The women and children travel
in one group, generally in gullies, winding
around low hills, where they are out of sight
of the game. The men scatter about as
sentinels, mounting little elevations now and
then, to search, with their eagle eyes, the
undulating plains for a herd of guanaco. When
on this weary chase they are always hungry,
and generally but half clothed. The sick and
the helpless aged are left by the wayside to
starve or to support life as best they can,
while the more vigorous go on and on
famine-stricken until they come upon their
game.
When in sight of guanaco the men seek to
surround the entire herd by creeping on hands
and feet and covering their bodies with the
robe to imitate the animals. As they close in
on them they rise, drop their robes, and
naked spring upon the guanaco,
Page 728
killing such as they can with arrows. Then,
as the animals stand in utter amazement, they
rush upon them with a knife or a club. In
this onslaught they often secure the entire
herd, and generally a large number. Next a
gluttonous hilarity begins, which knows no
bounds. It continues while the meat lasts,
and then famine is again their lot. Thus
their life is one of short feasts divided by
long famines.
The matter of clothing, with the Onas, is a
very simple affair. Although the climate of
their region is cold, stormy, and even humid,
they are very imperfectly dressed. The
children run about in the snow either naked
or nearly so. The men have a large mantle
made of several guanaco-skins sewed together.
This reaches from the shoulders to the feet,
but it is not attached by either buttons or
strings; it is simply held about the
shoulders by the hands. On the chase the
mantle is allowed to drop, while the hunter
rushes on, naked, to capture his game. The
women, when well dressed, wear a piece of fur
about the waist, and another loosely thrown
about the shoulders; but they are not often
well dressed, and must generally be contented
with a kind of mantle carelessly suspended
from the shoulders, which is allowed to fall
upon the slightest exertion.
Nothing could be more homeless than an Ona
house. It is proof to none of the discomforts
of Fuegian climate. Rain, snow, and wind
enter it freely. The house is a simple
accumulation of tree branches thrown together
in the easiest possible manner. Sometimes it
has a conical shape, but more often it is
only a crescent or breastwork, behind which
the entire family sit or sleep. To the
windward are thrown a number of skins to keep
out the wind, but from overhead the cold
rains drizzle over poorly clad bodies, while
the ground is always uncovered and cold. In
the center of this circle of shivering
humanity, or just outside of it, is a
campfire, which, however, serves better for
cooking purposes than for heating.
The arrangement of the house is such that the
heat all escapes. At night the fires are
allowed to go out, and the adults, lying in a
circle, place the children in the center,
with blankets of guanaco-skins spread over
all. To keep the blankets from being blown
off, and to add additional warmth, they next
call their dogs to take their positions on
the top of the entire mass of Indians. In
former years it was a poverty-stricken family
that did not have enough dogs to cover it out
of sight; but the shepherds have now killed
the dogs, and the Indians must rest cold and
comfortless without their canine bedfellows.
There seems to be considerable love expended
among the members of an Ona family. It is
kindled with the first rays of childhood, and
it is still burning at ripe old age. It is,
however, a love which is never appreciated by
a white man, nor is it ever tendered to him
except for brief spasmodic periods. Nothing
illustrates this point better than the
experience of the pale-faced new-comers.
Everybody who goes as a pioneer to the Cape
Horn regions is a bachelor. All buy, borrow,
or steal wives when they decide to settle
down upon a gold-mine or a sheep-farm. The
Indian women, it must be confessed, are not
unwilling to be bought or stolen, but they
are not to the white man what they are to the
copper-faced rival. In the Indian household a
wife may be but one of several; she can claim
only a small share of her husband's
affection; she must work hard, is badly
dressed, and is always half starved: but she
prefers this life as a steady thing to the
entire heart of a paleface, with the luxuries
which he brings to her.
Marriage, like almost everything Ona, is not
fixed by established rules. It is arranged
and rearranged from time to time to suit the
convenience of the contracting parties. Women
generally have very little to say about it.
The bargain is made almost solely by the men,
and physical force is the principal bond of
union. For ages the strongest bucks have been
accustomed to steal women from neighboring
tribes, and from neighboring clans of their
own tribe. The Onas, being by far the most
powerful Indians, have thus been able to
capture and retain a liberal supply of wives.
A missionary who has been in constant contact
with these Indians for thirty years has given
it as his opinion that a plurality of wives
is entirely satisfactory to their peculiar
emotions and habits of life.
The relation of the women who possess but one
husband in common in the family wigwam to one
another is of novel interest. As a rule, they
are no more jealous of one another than are
the children in a civilized home circle. The
principal reason for this is that the several
wives are often sisters. A young man takes by
force, by mutual agreement, or by barter, the
oldest daughter of a family. If he proves
himself a good hunter and a kind husband, the
wife persuades her sister to join her wigwam
and share her husband's affections.
Frequently, when a girl is left an orphan,
she is taken
Page 729
into a family and trained to become the
supplementary wife of her benefactor in after
years. In the hut each wife has her own
assigned position, always resting in exactly
the same spot, with all of her belongings
about her. The wealth of the household is not
common to all the occupants. Each woman has
her own basket of meat fragments, or
shellfish, her own bag with implements,
needles, sinews, and bits of fur, and each
wife has her own assemblage of children.
The unwritten laws which govern the actions
of the tribe as a whole are very vaguely
understood. There never has been any very
great need for the Onas to assemble and unite
against an enemy. Any one of the numerous
clans under one chief has been more than
equal to overcome the feeble onslaughts of
other Indians and white men. Hence the lack
of tribal organization. In the family,
however, the organization is firmly fixed by
habits which never change. The loose
arrangement of marriage and divorce does not
seem to disturb seriously the equilibrium of
the home circle. The camp is pitched from day
to day at spots convenient for the chase.
This makes elaborate houses or complex
fixtures impossible. It never requires more
than half an hour to build an Ona house.
The work of the man is strictly limited to
the chase. He carries his bow and quiver of
arrows, and his eye is ever on the horizon
for game; but he seldom stoops to anything
like manual labor that is not connected with
the actual necessities of the chase. He kills
the game, but the wife must carry it into
camp. In moving, the women take up all of
their earthly possessions, pack them into a
huge roll, and with this firmly strapped
across their backs they follow the
unencumbered lead of their brave but
ungallant husbands. Thus the women carry,
day after day, not only the household furniture,
but the children and the portable portions of
the house. The women certainly have all the
uninteresting detail and the drudgery of life
heaped upon them, but they seem to enjoy it.
In defense of the men it should be said that
they are worthy husbands. They will fight
fiercely to protect their homes, and they
will guard the honor of their women with
their own blood. It is a crying sin of the
advance of Christian civilization that this
red man of the far south should be compelled
to lay down his life at the feet of the
heartless pale-faced invaders to shield the
honor of his home.
I doubt if missionary efforts will improve
the hard lot of this noble band of human
strugglers. The efforts thus far made have
certainly had the contrary effect, and
altogether they do not need a new system of
morals as badly as we do ourselves. I do not
mean to infer that missionary work, in
general, is hurtful to aborigines. There is a
legitimate field for such efforts, but it is
not among Onas, unless the work is conducted
in a new manner by a thoroughly practical
man. They need to be placed in a position
where they may follow their wild habits
without the infectious degeneration of higher
life. Individually and collectively they have
fewer sins than New-Yorkers. It is true that
there are among them no faultless characters,
but there are also no great criminals. There
are some good and some bad, but the worst and
the best are found side by side.
The bitter and the sweet of human life flow
in the same stream. They have the same origin
and the same termination. The lesson of ages
to untutored man has impressed upon him a
prescription of moral direction, which is
quite as good as, and far more appropriate
for him than, the white man's code of ethics.
The Salesians in America The First Missions
(1875 - 1888)
The story of the departure of the first
Salesians for America in 1875 is based on the
missionary ideal of Don Bosco. All his life
he wanted to be a missionary, and his
biographer mentions that he was already
thinking about it when he was a young student
at Chieri. After his ordination, he would
have become a missionary had not his
director, Joseph Cafasso, opposed the idea.
He eagerly read the Italian edition of the
Annals of the Propagation of the Faith and
used this magazine to illustrate his
Cattolico provveduto (1853) and his Month of
May booklets (1858).
Patagonia
SALESIAN MISSIONS
2 LEFEVRE LANE, PO BOX 30 ·
NEW ROCHELLE NY 10802-0030
mailto:info@salesianmissions.org
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